Claudine Gay testifies in Washington (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
It’s said that these days universities are echo chambers, but perhaps nobody expected it to be demonstrated quite so literally. At the beginning of the month, Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned following weeks of plagiarism allegations. Some of these were unambiguous: whole paragraphs replicated with minimal alteration in a way that couldn’t easily be explained away as accidental. Other proposed cases were less manifestly intentional but nonetheless suggestive, including the fantastically bizarre claim that Gay plagiarised some lines of her dissertation’s acknowledgement section — the bit where, traditionally, authors fulsomely thank those people instrumental in their personal intellectual journey. Apparently this manager-in-waiting wasn’t even able to find the words to thank her own parents without borrowing a few lines from somebody else.
Whether this information causes you to call for the defunding of the academy or to shudder empathically probably depends on whether you think there’s any chance that, during some coffee-fuelled, sleep-deprived, deadline-driven moment in your own dim past, you might have done something similar — and whether anyone could now use it against you, if you had. As far as I remember, I never did this in my own university career, though of course I’d occasionally wake in the night, clammy with fear that my subconscious might have inadvertently hoovered up someone else’s vivid phrasing and spewed it out again on the page. But wherever you stand on this issue, it invites us to consider why we should care about plagiarism in modern universities — if, indeed, we still should at all.
One immediate thing revealed by the row is the extent to which some on both Left and Right only care about academic principles when it suits them. The plagiarism accusations emerged just after Gay’s much-publicised appearance in a congressional hearing on antisemitism on campus in the wake of October 7, sitting alongside the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. In a viral excerpt from the hearing, Gay and her fellow Presidents stated that “calling for the genocide of the Jews” would have to “cross into conduct” before becoming technically illicit according to their respective university policies. Many onlookers were scandalised by what looked like obvious antisemitism. Longstanding critics of DEI in universities scented blood: no doubt genuinely supportive of Israel, but also amplifying the outrage for opportunistic reasons. The Penn president was forced to resign four days later, and the combing of Gay’s back catalogue seems to have begun.
Yet not so well-publicised at the time were other parts of the hearing, in which “calling for the genocide of the Jews” was presented by representatives to their three squirming witnesses as the inevitable implication of pro-Palestinian chants like “from the river to the sea” or demands for “intifada”. You can argue about this semantic equivalence — but that’s precisely the point, it’s arguable. And in fact, the thrust of Gay’s answer here was correct. Given their emphasis on academic freedom, universities should not, as a rule, be in the business of policing offensive speech; and especially not when the speech in question is presumed by opponents to acquire its harm via a sinister hidden meaning at several removes of interpretation. (This point is not negated by the fact that some expressions of support for Hamas are unambiguously hateful towards Jews.) If the topic at hand was speech perceived by others to be covertly racist or transphobic, this is a point Gay’s critics on the Right would immediately endorse — except that, once they were trying to cause as much embarrassment as possible for a high-profile champion of DEI policies, it conveniently slipped from their minds.
From the Left, meanwhile, responses to claims about plagiarism by Gay have been depressingly predictable, as attempts are made to blot out the blatant problem of a university leader, paid in six figures, committing an infraction for which students on her own campus would be sanctioned. Defensively, many have scrambled to paint a touching picture of a poor, vulnerable, black female President of Harvard unfairly set upon by racist Right-wingers. Here it seems the capacity to detect nuance, temporarily acquired with respect to pro-Palestinian speech, has vanished once again, with all outward expressions of concern about the standard of Gay’s academic writing automatically becoming something more sinister. Other commentators have claimed that the strict standards outlawing plagiarism don’t apply in the same way to academics as they do to students, or else suggested that, since other high-profile cases of plagiarism have been overlooked, this one should be too.
On the whole, then, it seems that the Right doesn’t care about academic freedom when the contested words are those of enemies; and the Left doesn’t care about academic violations when committed by their friends. But then again, it seems that some on the Right don’t care about the latter either. After a billionaire hedge fund manager called Bill Ackman was particularly scathing of Gay, a bright spark at Business Insider magazine did a search on his wife Neri Oxman’s PhD thesis and discovered apparent plagiarism there too. Ackman has since listed a raft of reasons why Oxman’s case is different from that of Gay, including that she merely committed “clerical errors of missed punctuation” not “fraud”, and that she was not granted “due process” in the reporting of it. Suddenly vague about what constitutes misdemeanour now that a loved-one is in the frame, and apparently willing to allow repetition of another’s phrasing due to “laziness” or “unintentional errors”, Ackman proposes not to define plagiarism strictly but only to say that “we will know it, when we see it” —thereby invoking a well-known definition of obscenity by a Sixties Supreme Court Judge (“I know it when I see it”).
What Ackman doesn’t say, of course, is that this is also near-identical to the rubric witchfinders use to identify witches — which historically hasn’t worked out so well. In actual fact, though, with the help of computers it is still possible to identify many instances of plagiarism without doing a searching moral inventory of the author. Some standard definitions — including the one given to Harvard students — don’t even rely on the repetition being deliberate or intentional. Are there striking similarities of wording or structure? Are there quotation marks and a citation, or not? Are there more than a few similarities, so that the chances of accident reduce with each new instance? In detecting plagiarism, arguably you are not trying to look into someone’s soul but rather just picking out a particular writing behaviour.
Undeterred by his newfound qualms, with the help of AI and deep pockets, Ackman has now promised to launch a “plagiarism review” of all MIT faculty and administrators before moving on to Harvard and other Ivy League institutions next. And frankly, a lot of people must be sweating. Modern academic culture insists on the regular production of articles and books alongside sometimes heavy teaching and administrative duties. Disciplinary norms usually limit you in advance to using dull, colourless prose. The more technical your point, the more it can appear that all of the limited number of ways available to make it are already taken by others. You also know that, unless very famous or very lucky, hardly anyone is going to read what you produce anyway. It’s only words, perhaps you reason. Words are public property anyway. It’s not like you are stealing possessions from people.
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SubscribeA poor, vulnerable, black female? Gay, the poor thing, belongs to one of the ruling families in the corrupt hellhole that is Haiti. She was educated, if that’s the word,in elite prep schools before she graced Harvard with her presence.
An excellent post Sir!
In your last sentence I would have substituted polluted for graced.
And in contrast, Roland Fryer, born dirt poor, I believe his mother abandoned him, dragged himself up from the gutter, no rich family, fancy school or any kind of support structure…
And so much more class as a professor, formidable research skills and multiple phenomenal research piece, and most importantly, never portrayed himself as a victim or shyed away from difficult, non PC conclusions
And yet, look at how Harvard treated both of them.
The sheer contrast tells you enough about how and why Western civilization and values are under threat.
Indeed the contrasting treatment of both should be enough to bring disgrace on the whole rotten system
OMG is she really a babina Doc..? send her back and they can do justice Port Au Prince style!
Maybe we’ll find out Frau Störk is descended from a high ranking NSDAP official lol – she certainly has the swivel eyed certainty of the ideologue or zealot – blood will out eh?
What happens when a rich, not very clever kid who has attended all the best schools in the land. Obviously they cannot get a job in business (the business has to survive), so it’s academia or the government, survival of these institutions is not an issue. Then DEI kicks in.
“…left and right only care about academic principles when it suits them.”
If you are putting together an argument which others will find persuasive, you need to couch it in terms they care about. The “they” in this case are Harvard academics. They don’t care about antisemitism. They don’t care about freedom of speech (that zero rating from FIRE). So there is no point in arguing in these terms. You’ll lose the argument. Plagiarism they do care about, so frame it in those terms. It worked.
It’s a depressing commentary on modern academia.
Incidentally, if anyone is seriously interested in the mental health of students, I have a modest proposal. Students should not be left to be intimidated or frightened by their fellow students, or berated by academics for their religion or their beliefs. It’s a bit controversial, but there we are.
She never wrote a book, and about 12, pretty poor and useless, published papers in 20 years. According to University heads, this would not get someone into a teaching role headed to tenure.
She is so totally, obviously, completely, a Token hiree – she is in the position only for her race and gender. That is what the Right are on about. That the tool of Plagiarism is the only handy one which may be said openly – well, it will do to use. She represents every single thing which is anti – Enlightenment Liberal; Rot in the system which will destroy us all.
You forget her glasses. We all know that scholars wear glasses because they read so many learned books, and with gargantuan frames like that she’s obviously a genius.
Don’t underestimate the cartoonish quality of the contemporary campus!
Laughed out loud at this!
Meanwhile when my son applies for a jobs with some of our leading companies he has to answer all kinds of questions about his race and background that will result in his application going straight in to the bin regardless of his qualifications for the job and regardless of whether he may be best person for the job
I am astonished to hear this. I thought companies were terrified of being sued for race discrimination and sedulously avoided any reference to a candidate’s race and background. I thought the application only went in the bin regardless of qualifications if you were obviously white and male and they were short of ethnic female hires to make up the desired DEI profile.
What exotic background is so intriguing about your son that all sense of self and company preservation goes out of the window and provokes questions about race and background? Does he have some obvious connection with a famous ethnic villain – Pol Pot, Stalin or some other name that might send my post direct to the Sin Bin?
Obtuse of me I know but I did not quite get the second paragraph
I merely wondered why a recruiting panel would throw caution to the wind and ask about your son’s race and background. I could only imagine he had a name like Pol Pot or Stalin so they might be tempted to ask if there was a family connection. If your son is clearly white why would the subject or race and background come up? Does he speak in a thick foreign accent so that this might provoke enquiry as to his race and background?
As I say any leading company will have well drilled their interviewers to avoid any enquiry that might open the company to legal action.
I see.
For most job applications now you have to complete a questionnaire. A couple of years ago there would have been a few question about ethnicity and sexuality.
Now there are a lot of additional questions including the postcode of the address where you lived at 14, whether you had free school meals…
The weeding out is done well before you get to an actual interview
Thanks. I am appalled to hear it. Clearly DEI in action.
We have started down the same path in my place of work even though we really struggle to recruit and have don for some time
I confirm this. My sons are going through the same thing and I’ve seen the forms. It beggars belief but it’s true. And I’ve been told by someone close to the HR community of Oxford University that the real killer is a well-to-do postcode. Positively Maoist. Some people get around this by renting flats in inner-city areas, never living in them but using them as the addresses of record for them and their offspring.
Even worse is to come.
Labour promises us a race relations act that prioritises black people over white for Government contracts
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/02/labour-hopes-to-ensure-black-led-firms-access-lucrative-government-contracts
Labour is also planning to pressure the courts to establish quotas for how many black criminals get punished for their violent crimes and to introduce racial quotas to be applied for disciplinary action for public sector staff.
Most contractors in the UK public sector demand that sub contractors tell them who and how their staff like to f**k as well as their ethnicity. Where have you been??
He White.
Saw a headline just recently that said emphatically that DEI must DIE. I wholeheartedly agree.
I don’t know where you live, but it’s illegal in the United States to discriminate based on race or any other factor. HR is explicitly forbidden to ask about race or religious background, or indeed any other personal question not related directly to the position being applied to.
Unless, of course, the applicant is white. No questions need be asked; they go to the back of the line.
There are 2 elements to any legal system, the law itself and then the enforcement of the law.
If you are non-white and you make a claim of discrimination you will likely succeed in screwing a few grand out of a prospective employer even if there is not the remotest evidence of discrimination.
If you are white you can have very strong evidence of discrimination but the Court will reject your claim on the basis that your application was rejected for some other wholly acceptable reason.
This is how the legal system works.
Jim Crow never died in the States. He was rebranded, first as affirmative action and now, under the DEI umbrella.
That’s actually not quite true. HR organizations collect reams of data on race, gender, etc. during the hiring process and may have to use all of that information to prove to the regulators (or courts) that they are indeed including diversity in the job search process. In theory that information is supposed to firewalled from the hiring decision makers. Unfortunately, since another element that frequently becomes legally contentious is the actual mix that is hired the firewall leaks — particularly because the HR data collectors usually also have a role in the final hiring decisions. This can be direct “I don’t recommend hiring that individual.” or indirect by providing a compensation analysis the produces an unacceptably low offer that the candidate must refuse. And this same sort of ‘analysis’ is applied during layoff decisions as well. Unfortunately, the various ‘can’t discriminate’ regulations and ‘must discriminate’ realities clash directly and failure to manage that conflict can literally be a business killer. Sources? Me. I had to balance these elements directly as VP HR in two reasonably large organizations. I eventually changed careers as I could no longer handle the required hypocrisy.
So true – due to the vagaries of UK “education” there are certain jobs that can only be done by people at FEs or Polytechnics before c1976 – overwhelmingly white and 95% male too….So the HR shills accept that’s the only option to make it happen but then blame the hirers for not hiring BME women – or gays, TSs etc etc. By all means send the migri to Rwanda BUT deporting the HR women to Gaza so Hamas can use them as human sheilds seems a sensibl eoption considering the damage they cause to our economy.
Entirely correct but you did not mention weeding out of CVs where HR decide which CVs get seen.
Since they can’t ask, they assume. Since it’s HR, which in most companies is the incompetent doorkeeper to the the people who actually want to hire somebody, their assumptions become a whim of iron.
It’s the same in the UK where discrimination laws apply in all these areas: e.e. race, sex, age, sexual orientation, etc. ad nauseam.
But if you’re white and male, and older, you have no chance. Just consider the example of the female CEO of the huge Aviva group who has a stated policy of not employing white men. She and her organisation have not, to my knowledge, been subjected to legal action; and men are arguably too emasculated by the white man hatred prevalent everywhere to have any faith in the system anyway.
My brother-in-law was laid off by IBM when he was 63, despite being the employee of the year twice and having dinner with the CEO. Panic. He was a white male two years away from Medicare. He was surprised to have an offer from a young, but successful, company for a lot of money. The company’s workforce was mainly made up of twenty-somethings, and had the usual makeup of trans, black, Hispanic, minority women, etc. My brother-in-law asked the interviewer why he was chosen. The guy rolled his eyes and said, “We need an adult in the room.”
Brilliant story! Thanks for sharing.
That’s called Justice today.
Well there are still jobs for STEM students that are awarded on merit and i suggest they look at SMEs in that sector. The elite morons – eg Claudia Gay and Catalina Stok or whatever name they assume – have never had to work but i expect they’d whinge like hell if their caviar wasn’t on the shelves or their sewage backed up into their marble bathrooms. Meanwhile decent human beings spend their time designing, building and maintaining the infrastructure that keep these extractive parasites in socks – and caviar, marble fittings and probably cocaine if my observations are correct.
I am afraid that you are out of date. STEM has also been captured. My son has just finished his physic PHD and is applying for related roles.
He says that since he completed he has seen the wording of job applications harden. Apparently the questionnaire use to a rider to the effect the information would not be used in the selection process an was only being collected so that the organisation could report on the diversity of the work force (if you believe that…). Now the rider has gone and the questions are a lot more detailed.
There is still the option of declining to answer the questions but if you do so the application will probably go straight into the bin.
There is also the option of identifying as Afro-Caribbean. If a man can identify as a woman Ii can see no reason why a white male cannot identify as Afro-Caribbean or even as an Afro-Caribbean lesbian
I guess that’s the corporate /govt sector? SMEs tend not follow that path, but better step on it though: if Starmer and his paymasters Gates and Soros get their way small and medium enterprises will be made illegal. They have the same hatred of “shopkeepers” as Napoleon, but they are not flawed tactical geniuses, just very flawed paradies of humanity. Unlike Los Corsos they are cowards.
“[T]he information would not be used in the selection process an was only being collected so that the organisation could report on the diversity of the work force (if you believe that…)”
I do not, given that if it were true, they would surely save themselves some effort by asking only those candidates they had actually hired!
“Catalina Stock” — nobody sane would put Kathleen Stock and Claudia Gay in the same sentence or accuse the former of “never having to work” or eating “caviar.”
Wonder what would happen if your son wrote he was actually a two spirited non-binary person with a twist of some far away historic culture. Do some deep digging in your family history and you might find something useful.
We have laws against that. Oh wait.
Not quite. Claudine Gay was a crusader for DEI as well as black and female. Those three qualities allowed the appointments board to decide in her favour. Her zeal for DEI was one of the reasons that Claudine Gay and others blighted the career of Roland Fryer because he discovered data about policing that didn’t fit the narrative.
DEI is like alcohol, there’s nothing wrong with the principle, but in practice there must be limits – when messrs poo and fan conjoin you can guess its gone too far. What we see with UK/US DEI is pure and simple racism like the KKK or Aryan Brotherhood.
Gay’s treatment of dissent from progressive dogmas at Harvard was abominable.
The hypocrisy shown by her argument for “free speech” – when Harvard and her offices both rank dead last for academic freedom rankings – is simply breathtaking.
Her scholarship – much of which was plagiarized unambiguously – tended to center around the statistical analyses within her dissertation, and indicates that she doesn’t fully comprehend very basic scientific principles, like the differences between correlation, which can be meaningless, and causality, which is very difficult to prove.
Much of what she stitched together was either nonsensical, or spurious. Much of what rang true was copied verbatim from Carol Swain, a far more accomplished scholar.
Her timidity in condemning Anti-semitism also gave her game away. It indicated that she’s terrified of confronting Wahabist-Salafist sympathizers and blatant anti-Semites on her campus, an issue that’s severe at many universities.
Students and other activists who openly threaten Jews, or cause huge disruptions to learning and to life, don’t deserve burritos and cold seltzer.
They deserve to be expelled, or if they’re physically harming others, arrested.
She also comes from a wealthy highly educated family – so she is the perfect symbol of how identity politics have replaced class with race and other lauded characteristics. No poor people allowed.
Which is I suspect is one of the more insidious motives for DEI and CRT.
It isn’t so much to “give minorities a fair shot,” so much as to keep the “wrong sorts” of whites out of the club.
Beneficiaries of upper tier DEI tend to be stylishly dressed minority women, with very articulate speech and well honed manners. Many of them seem to be very unlikely to have come from the ranks of the poor, or the working classes.
The Boomerang Effect
The ongoing crusade against plagiarism is likely to face significant challenges with the advancement of artificial intelligence. This development may lead to unforeseen consequences, proving to be a source of embarrassment for individuals across various cultures and demographics. The current pace of publishing, characterized more by its volume than its quality, is poised to have widespread impacts. This shift will likely prompt a collective realization and acknowledgment of the limitations in our current understanding and competencies. I think it will be the best equalizing of all.
I am personally pleased that the recent scrutiny and questioning of processes, previously unexamined at this level, was initiated by the expression of anger towards black women.
Plagiarism is a “sin” at all levels and “the academy” must be fundamentalist about it. Even sloppy citation is a sin, intellectual and moral. But sinful too was Gay’s pathetic response to being forced to resign, having the colossal gall to state that “racial animus” was in the mix. Her publication record is a total joke, and Harvard has been magnificently shamed for allowing someone of her paltry record even to be considered for the university’s presidency. Harvard earned this one.
Plagiarism is an example of a good old-fashioned Catholic mortal sin, the worst imaginable: laziness.
“…The worst imaginable”? You havn’t been reading the news recently, have you?
Plagiarism is an example of a good old-fashioned Catholic mortal sin, the worst imaginable: laziness.
Oh really? I’m pretty sure it is grounds for dismissal as a student. I don’t even care if she resigned, got the boot, or stayed on for years. The important thing is Harvard was exposed as a hollow institution run by a bunch of useless clowns. That will have more important long term effects.
Exactly! The “elite” leftist brand took a big hit.
As an academic myself… English prof since 2006…I can vouch for the fact that plagiarism can lead to a student’s dismissal. The first offense is usually met with a consequence the instructor has in place. The second plagiarism offense is meted out by the school, usually failure of the course. The third offense is often expulsion from the university.
And yet, there she stays. I wonder if she were white and male, given her obvious failings, if she’d still be allowed to step foot on campus
Gay, although black, is the daughter of recent African immigrants to America. Her ancestors were not slaves. Why didn’t they find a descendant of slaves to serve in this role?;)
In the interests of accuracy, Gay’s family are Haitian therefore her ancestors were likely to have been slaves. Haiti having been founded as a result of a slave uprising.
They are however wealthy industrialists.
Before that uprising Haïti had been the very successful French colony of Saint-Domingue.
Thus it looks as if some ‘Frog’ may have had a bout of “jungle fever” as we used to call it.
Being wealthy industrialists in Haiti must surely throw up many questions about the misuse of power and privilege – are the liberal left at all interested?
We’ve seen the stats claiming at least half of those who matriculate at such schools as Harvard who tick the ‘black’ box come from Caribbean, African, and/or biracial backgrounds. If AA was intended as a civil-rights era program to redress discrimination against the African-American descendants of slaves, why is it juked via DEI for those from privileged and/or non-U.S. backgrounds? Similar arguments apply to Latinos/Hispanics. Canada exemplifies this inconsistency, exponentially magnified.
Maybe she is the offspring of one of the Docs ?
What worries me is Claudine Gay’s connection with the Haitian Concrete Industrial Complex. That is very concerning and suggests that she is a member of the oppressor class and not a helpless oppressed person of color as advertised.
Clearly there are different degrees of plagiarism and they should be treated differently IMO. I don’t know to what degree Gay appropriated other people’s work, and I really don’t care.
My issue with Gay and other progressive leaders is their destructive influence on civil society. She wants to tear everything down, not build things up, which is ironic considering how much she has benefited from the institutions she despises.
I beg to disagree on the abtract question, of whether or not plagiarism is morally wrong, even if I really don’t know much about the accusations against Claudine Gay (I’m not really following the story). Plagiarism is a form of lying (to the intended readership of the work in question) as much as it is a form of stealing (from the actual author of the words being plagiariarized).
It is one thing if, as this Fabio Paglieri says, that punishing plagiarism is partly motivated by a desire to discourage it (a perfectly valid and sound position), but another altogether to say that that is the only motivation for blaming a plagiarist or for sanctioning a plagiarist, should his plagiarism become known. That is a kind of consequentialism that can easily slip into relativism. Retributive blame and retributive punishment, even if such punishment is not doled out by the State, for something morally wrong is perfectly fine, and indeed their rejection is just not acceptable.
I’m inclined to agree. There is a clear moral element involved in plagiarism, which brings into question the character of someone found guilty.
I have a suspicion, especially given Kathleen Stock’s closing remarks, that the case she’s ostensibly making for it not to be a moral issue has been made in order for it to be overturned by herself, in a final damning indictment.
It wouldn’t be the first time she’s used this mode of argument
I’m inclined to agree as well. It is the very essence of academic writing that you support your arguments by using the findings of those who have blazed the trail before you. You can even use their words, but in both cases, you need to reference them. Plagiarism is the conscious act of not doing so.
By not referencing your sources, you deny your sources the recognition they earned and deserve by being first with the thought that you find so great that you are re-using it. How many times an academic is referenced (the H Index) is one of the key metrics of an academics performance and academic standing.
So no, by plagiarising, and therefore withholding from your sources the academic recognition they have earned, you are actually harming them.
I’m in agreement with you on that, but this is all a smokescreen for her unabashed antisemitism. The REAL reason she stepped down is due to her pitiful responses to questions in front of Congress about whether students calling for the eradication of Jews is considered protected speech on her campus. If those protesters simply switched the word Black for Jew, we would have riots like never before. She still is there as a professor, still making her enormous salary. Completely unfathomable just a few years ago, but now accepted.
Yes. And Kathleen misses a point here, “From the land to the sea” is a call to wipe out the Jews of Israel. That such a call is not a direct call for the extermination of Jews elsewhere, it is a call the destroy the Jewish State, an action that entails mass murder. Hamas’s charter and its public statements call for war against the Jews in toto. Anyone demonstrating on its behalf is, knowingly or not, supporting that goal.
This is too simplistic.
Regarding the call “from the land to the sea”, it needs to be understood that both Zionists and Islamists call for “from the land to the sea”, only that for Zionists, that is the (minimum) Greater Israel, whereas for Islamists, that is an Islamic Palestine.
There is a further interpretation, in that the continuation is “… shall be free”. Freedom need not be either Zionist or Islamist. It is entirely possible to envision a secular state between the land and the sea where both Jews and Muslims (and the adherents of the various other religions in Israel/Palestine) can feel free.
Finally, even if we go with the Islamist notion of eliminating the State of Israel (which would be a violation of the UN Charter), this does not mean the murder of all Jews in that area. Islam has never had a problem with Jewish communities in Islamic lands, so long of course the Jewish communities “know their place”. This is not the solution acceptable to Western secular liberalism, but it is not genocide, either.
I think Stock addresses this though – it isn’t always a lie, because plagiarism can and does include errors that were unintentional. This is why she included the paragraph about students waking up in a sweat that they had inadvertently used someone else’s words, or missed out on something that ought to have been attributed.
The essence of a lie is that you are know you are misrepresenting the truth.
What she is saying is that even when plagiarism is inadvertent, and there is no moral culpability, it is something that needs to be treated very seriously, because it still undermines the integrity of the institution.
The problem is the application of double standards in DEI because the basis of DEI is not factual but ideological. It doesn’t matter whether Gay is removed or not (she is actually not) as it doesn’t solve the problem of DEI bureaucracy.
I think Bill Ackman would be best advised to stop funding Harvard at all and to focus on funding new universities that take a clear stand against DEI and favor science instead of ideology. His merit is to have created public awareness for the DEI cancer in higher education.
Bill Ackman is an aluminus of MIT , his wife a former professor there. He has nothing to do with Harvard.
According to Wikipedia, one of the sources of his wife’s woes, Bill Ackman received a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude in social studies from Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1988. Also, although he is indeed a billionaire hedge fund manager, Kathleen Stock is wrong to imply that he is of the Right: he is “a longtime donor to Democratic candidates and organizations” [Wikipedia again – I think at the moment we can trust its entry on Mr Ackman].
If you commit sins you will not go to “Heaven”
If her heaven was Harvard then she definitely committed sins in order to get the top job there
“For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God”
“Neither do I condemn you: go and sin no more”
“The kingdom of heaven is within you” (and so is the pit of hell)
But you put “scare quotes” around Heaven so maybe it’s just a cheeky set up for your next line. You pivot between apparent sincerity and facetiousness with such ease that it’s hard to see where or if you take a stand on anything. But I guess that’s intentional, and sometimes it’s entertaining or surprising in a good way.
I think Kathleen Stock misses one important point.
Claudine Gay was promoted to the effective CEO of what is arguably the most prestigious university in the world with an academic record which wouldn’t match that of many junior lecturers. Just 11 published articles. A record which apparently nobody thought to raise concerns about.
For it then to transpire that multiple sections of that emaciated body of work are plagiarised is just piling insult on top of injury.
Gay is merely another DEI grifter, albeit a high functioning one of the academic variety. She deserves her comeuppance. But what is really at stake here is how academia has discarded its integrity, belief in reasoned inquiry, and purpose to prostrate itself before the new secular God of Identitarianism.
I agree that she thoroughly deserves her comeuppance. DEI hires like her are almost always as bad as you would expect them to be. But for me, what is really at stake is the means by which her transgressions came to light.
If Gay had equivocated before Congress on the issue of punishing calls for genocide against, say, cis-gendered white males, I have little doubt that she would still be President of Harvard today.
Right-wingers need to pause and think hard about how and whether the ends justify the means here. Only yesterday, they seemed to believe so ardently in free speech.
A couple of thoughts: first, for better or worse, right-wingers are playing the game under the rules that the left has codified. People warned that the identity thing was getting out of hand and that silencing inconvenient views would produce a blowback effect. Second, free speech does not allow for incitement. If calling for the genocide of ANY group is in line with your campus ethics policy, then you are either ignorant of what “ethics” means or you’re just openly bigoted, the latter having been proven true beyond all doubt at many schools. Advocating genocide against straight whites isn’t cool, either, though you are right that no one would have cared.
Point by point:
1) Yes, right-wingers are playing by the left’s rules. And my opinion is, it’s ‘for worse’ that they do so.
2) Incitement to violence is already covered under existing legal precedent. Harvard should have no need to codify into its student conduct rules things that are covered by the law. But even if they do, then such a policy is consistent with Gay’s testimony: i.e. that the extent to which calls for genocide violate ethics rules are context-specific. Incitement to hatred, on the other hand, is a bull-shoot concept invented by radical leftists, precisely to enforce censorship that would otherwise be prohibited under 1A.
3) Advocating genocide isn’t cool, no. But the question is not what we consider ‘cool’ or not. It’s how we use the mechanisms of power to sanction and police thoughts and ideas. Gay was right to hesitate in calling for sanctions against pro-Palestinian students. Where she failed, was in failing to apply the same standard to anti-trans students, racist students, etc.
The white man is the equivalent of the devil in American academia.
The preferred term of the media these days is “hard-right”. Please try to keep up.
Most of the ‘right wing’ that I know are appalled more by the hypocrisy of her position than the speech itself. If supporting Hamas is legitimate so should supporting any other cause — which previously Gay had made explicitly clear that most conservative causes she would not. The second element that gets swept away in these conversations is the overt harassment that accompanies so much of this pro-Hamas emotion. The speech is acceptable, the harassment is not.
I think there were people on the right, and maybe even the left, who had pointed out her academic failings before, and tried to make them public.
It was only after the other controversy anyone with any power in the university seemed willing to take them seriously. Perhaps because they had decided they needed to be rid of her pronto for optics reasons, and the plagiarism provided a level to get her to resign quickly.
So I am not sure that it is so much a matter of hypocrisy on the right as generally seeing her as a bad egg in every way. Her claim that intellectual freedom needed to be respected might well have been accepted if she had integrity in terms of the rest of her record. But she clearly has no academic integrity, nor has she been a respecter of academic freedom generally.
Be careful. In my academic discipline (economics) I know of a number of (rightly) distinguished academics whose reputations – and even Nobel Prizes – rest on a very small number of publications. An example is the late Martin Weitzman whose reputation was established by a single paper “Prices vs Quantities” published in 1974. His published output was relatively small until the last decade of his life.
The issue of quantity vs quality is a huge problem in modern academic life. A reluctance to make honest – and open – judgements about quality leads to strong incentives to publish as much as possible. Dr Gay’s limited output should not be a problem if most of the publications were outstanding pieces. They were not. As far as I can tell, they were unoriginal and repetitive. It is mediocrity that is the issue, not the small quantity of publications.
`Dr’ Gay’s (does she still get to keep her title if she plagiarized in her thesis?) body of work has neither quantity or quality going for it. She was hired to tick boxes
Also, she leveraged a job offer from her Harvard PhD advisor to get Stanford to counter. Typical academic move. So with only 3 published (with another pending publication) articles, she landed a.tenured position. Which she quit a year later to return to Harvard. I challenge her apologists, as how many professors at elite universities would land tenure with such a paltry record? And for certain ‘non-disadvantaged, overrepresented’ applicants, this c.v. wouldn’t get you a secure gig at a lowly two-year institution.
She gets to keep her title and her salary of $900k p.a. She was removed only from her position but is still a member of staff.
She resigned though, she wasn’t removed as president. If they want to get rid of her as a staff member I imagine they will have to go through some significant administrative processes.
Thanks for pointing that out, Gordon. Often overlooked is the pressure on faculty from university administrators to publish. As a result there is a lot peer-reviewed research out there which amounts to very little because of the ‘publish or die’ mentality.
“Mediocrity” is a racist term.
Very, very good point.
When I did my PhD in the late 1990s it was drilled into us that when it came to future career prospects nobody gave a crap how brilliant we thought our thesis was. If you wanted a career in academia the advice was to publish early and publish often. Departmental research grading depended on it.
Of course genius will out and if you do come up with something genuinely groundbreaking, especially in the hard sciences, then yes, its still possible to make a reputation on a single piece.
There will be no comeuppance. She simply switched offices and titles. Her salary is undisturbed. Her employment continues. Gay will probably monetize this through a book deal, various speeches, and possibly a board seat or two. Because that’s how far off the rails things are. How ironic considering the 15th commemorates MLK, a man whose words become less and less relevant by the year.
“Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.” Gramsci, 1915
It was a very slow if relentless march through out the 20th century but once they discovered ‘racism’ and ‘gender’ they hit the jackpot and once harnessed to the cause via academia and social media such as Tic Tok things have moved very fast indeed. Who could believe that something as vile and nasty as CRT would be treated with such respect in academia and even taught in schools? Who, even a few years ago, would believe that a government would advocate for men – even those found guilty of violent crimes against women – would be allowed into women’s prisons or hospital wards simply because they said they identified as woman?
The ostensible reasons for her resignation are plagiarism and unwillingness to confront campus intimidation, but there is an additional aspect. The Ivy League reward their university leaders with huge salaries (by UK standards), but Americans expect their leaders to perform well in high-profile confrontations, such as congressional hearings. She clearly couldn’t think on her feet and allowed herself to be boxed into a corner. So she is simply not up to the job. Had she found a riposte to Ms Stefanik’s badgering, I suspect she could have ridden out the anti-semitism and plagiarism storms.
Her publication record is so astoundingly poor for a senior Ivy League academic that the accusations of plagiarism are flogging a dead horse.
I don’t know, UK university vice-chancellors’ salaries are pretty huge too.
Top earning UK vice chancellor is on £714,000per year. Top earning US university leader is on US$2,509,687 (£2,023,300) a year
‘Had she found a riposte’? How about if she’d just answered the frigging question?
A good start indeed!
And, by the way, if anyone out there would care to punish me by paying me $800,000 or $900,000 a year (press reports vary), just please let me know what morally neutral acts of dishonesty I can commit to qualify for it.
And I’d be the victim here, understand?
I’ll repeat the same point I made under the other article.
If Gay was a good faith defender of freedom of speech then she could very easily have stood on those grounds. But she isn’t.
You can’t on the one hand insist that “words are violence” when it suits your causes, yet suddenly everything is about context when it comes to calls for genocide.
From watching their testimony, I’m not actually convinced Gay is clever enough to recognise her own hypocrisy and logical failure. She is barely a qualified academic, after all. Or perhaps she is simply so far down the DEI rabbit hole that she sincerely believes things like “misgendering” are worse than calls to extinguish the state of Israel.
My impression was that Liz Magill, who is a legal scholar of considerable standing, did understand her own hypocrisy as her testimony left her mouth. Her shit-eating look suggested to me that here was someone who knew she was debasing her own intelligence with nonsense.
I’m sorry but I thought stealing, ie taking and using somebody else’s property, was stealing. It has not taken Ms Stock long to falter.
Not that long ago we used to hang thieves in their thousands. Those reprieved were usually dispatched to the American Colonies and later to Australia.
Indeed… but Harvard and other similar institutions react viscerally when people dare to speak against left identity politics, etc. Free speech has been already damaged.
Arguably the university system has been selling counterfeit and damaged goods for some time. Claudine Gay happened to be a small reckoning – and since Bill Ackman considers himself to be a liberal then it is self serving to blame ‘the Right’ for the denouement.
For all her faults, Claudine Gay should get a pass on the plagiarism. It wasn’t serious. She didn’t rip off anyone else’s ideas. She did minor borrowing of no import. Similar to what Neri Oxman did. And Jane Goodall in her ghost-written book Seeds of Change.
A century ago Mark Twain wrote a letter to Helen Keller giving his thoughts on plagiarism after she was accused of it. Alexander Graham Bell offered similar solace. Those letters are worth reading.
We all imitate others, and build on their work. As long as we don’t blatantly steal, we should be excused the copying. And maybe even if we do steal, as long as we add something original of our own.
As Steve Jobs put it, “It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you are doing. Because of the saying that ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’, we have been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
Have you seen the plagiarised passages which are available online, next to the originals? You might change your mind in Gay’s case.
Indeed. It’s pretty comical and pathetic.
Yes, I’ve seen the originals and the copies in the cases of both Claudine Gay and Neri Oxman. And I remember seeing much the same in the case of Jane Goodall.
Then your judgment is, to put it kindly, lacking.
If Claudine Gay had been allowed to stay on as President of Harvard, every Harvard student ever accused of plagiarism as per the University’s own code, could plead the “Claudine Gay” excuse, as in, if the President is allowed to use “duplicative language”, then why not me? Then, the whole edifice of academic endeavour in the university would crumble. No board – not even the wokiest of the woke – could allow this to happen and for that reason, Gay’s continuing presidency was untenable.
One of the people whose work Claudine Gay plagiarised is the black female scholar Carol Swain, who herself said that Gay should resign. https://www.thecollegefix.com/black-scholar-plagiarized-by-harvards-gay-sends-legal-demand-letter-unlawful-copying/
In my view Carol Swain has delusions of grandeur. A chip on her shoulder. She also wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. Claudine Gay and My Scholarship – WSJ
Tell that to Carol Swain. She copied portions of her work verbatim.
Good article. Thank you.
Faking data or publishing things you know are wrong are scientific misconduct, and unforgivable. Taking credit for other people’s work or ideas is also scientific misconduct, and unacceptable. Repeating or paraphrasing short sections of text without attribution is still wrong, but most of all it is just sloppy work – and we are all a bit sloppy, sometimes. If Caroline Gay had defended herself sensibly against the congressional hearing or had been able to show a serious body of academic work, the odd bit of duplicated phrasing should not have made that much of a difference. What got her was the sloppiness, and the plagiarism charge just nailed that down. Not only had she not produced much consequential work, let alone enough to earn a professorship at Harvard, she had not even be able to make a proper job of the work that she did do.
Still, the entrapment defence does not hold. Whatever went before, there are only two valid answers to the question “Is calling for genocide of Jews against the rules of your institution”? Either you say “Yes, of course (if it is done openly)”, or you say “It is the policy of the University not to police *any* legal speech, no matter how hateful, racist, homophobic etc. it is”. For Caroline Gay the second answer would have been an obvious lie; if she cannot give the first she is accepting that calling for genocide of Jews is actually OK.
I have only been accused of plagiarism by a teacher once as a snotty schoolboy. I was extremely flattered that my essay was regarded as so good no one but some learned adult could have written it. Equally I was quite flattered when something I had written on line received the compliment of another reader saying they would copy it in future.
In the case of most of us who go on to relatively undistinguished but respectable careers after University plagiarism doesn’t really matter. In the case of someone elevated to be the President of one of the world’s most prestigious Universities it is a tad embarrassing. Even Harvard with all its DEI enthusiasm has felt they need to retire Claudine Gay to a less exposed prominence. Not exactly cancelled on US $ 900,000 a year and continued tenure, not even the two year suspension she imposed against advice on the far more intellectually impressive Professor Roland Fryer. Treated indeed like the British students Kathleen Stock refers to. Just a few marks deducted to avoid further embarrassment.
How simply delectable that Harvard* should have humiliated itself in this way.
(* Founded 1636.)
ps. As I recall a noted commentator on UnHerd, one Ms Allison Barrows, antecedents pitched up in 1634.
Indeed. This story was a huge pick-me-up for me.
Arguments from Antiquity: Founded 450BCE. In other words: as old as the hills but rather thin on significance. Not baseless, but rather thin, sir.
Not BCE but BC.
Sure, the older usage. I prefer it too. But as a vehement anti-Christian I thought maybe you’d like Before the Common Era better.
No I would prefer AUC or ‘Ab urbe condita’- From the foundation of the City, as calculated by one Marcus Terentius Varro.
The actual date is the 21st April. This year that is a Sunday so a good day to visit the Pantheon and watch the sunrise.
A long as remember that it wasn’t built in a day.
And a very nice time of year to visit Rome in general. As I recall from a visit long ago: “Marcus Agrippa built it in his third term of office”
Rebuilt by Hadrian but he left the original inscription to MA in place.
Plagiarism aside, and I accept that there may be gray areas, is a publication record of 11 unremarkable papers sufficient for a tenured professorship at Harvard these days?
Depends who’s asking. 😉
Plagiarism is a sin. Its infringement is both intellectual and moral and its consequences is the weakening of trust, not only within universities but within the society as a whole. Claudine Gay, like many others within the educated lot of our society is not only a spineless weakling, she is a producer of counterfeit culture, who has been pushed to the top by the woke movement and its cretinism.
How can we, as a society, get rid of this ignominy?
Sorry, this one is intellectual and moral, given her whole shtick is holding a sort of academic seance to discover “racism”. Like all supposed scholars, she knew the audience, knew the right politics, and got rewarded for parroting the latter to the former. Her discipline belongs properly in a school of theology.
Kathleen, I’d be interested to know:
Did you write as well as this before you were pushed to resign? It’s a pleasure to read.
Was your release from academic straight-jacket a liberating experience which improved the clarity of your thought?
No shock UnHerd’s take on something will be morally tone deaf. Plagiarism is a moral ill precisely because it is a variety of lie, of fraud.
I don’t know.
Reaching the top of academia comes with huge prizes and, for many academics, they don’t even contribute anything much valued by anyone.
The one saving grace for the whole system is that it produces new knowledge. That new knowledge comes at a very high price so, if it turns out that it’s so very difficult to clearly formulate a new idea, you’re in the wrong game; cheating in that game is rightly taken very seriously.
People, whether on the right or left, are justified in having high expectations of academia.
I taught in a few British universities. One look at those glasses and that hairstyle generates an immediate state of Pavlovian terror. There should be a trigger warning. I need a lie down.
Unfathomable based.
The best thing about the congressional hearing is it exposed the shear malignancy of educational institutions run by women just because they are women. That Gay’s plagiarism and utter lack of qualifications were also laid bare is really a side issue, albeit an important one: the academy is loaded with ideologues and diversity hires for whom education means nothing more than repeating approved tropes and cashing big paychecks.
The best teachers – and that’s what these people are supposed to be – are men and women who know their fields inside and out and lead their students to question, explore, study, and learn. Does any of that even happen anymore?
Bosh.
“On the whole, then, it seems that the Right doesn’t care about academic freedom when the contested words are those of enemies…”
This statement is unfair and inaccurate. I’m an American and I love my Bill Of Rights, particularly the First Amendment. Also, I’m not part of ‘the Right’. What has people so upset is the hypocrisy that has been on full display whether it’s related to what people can say and to whom, to what constitutes plagiarism. A lot of us Normies are kinda pi$$ed, too.
What frustrates me is the immediate use of ‘right-wing’ as a slur for anyone who says something against the person or thing in question. Why is anything you don’t like ‘right-wing’? It seems anyone who says anything about the ex Harvard boss is ‘right-wing’, even if they raise an apolitical technical point.
I recently came across the comedian Rosie Jones, who happens to have cerebral palsy and sits in a wheelchair. She declared in an interview that she was ‘extremely labour leaning’ but I wondered why anyone would care about who she votes for . She then sadly revealed that following wider exposure on question time she’s received lots of online abuse from ‘right-wingers’. How does she know that all these trolls are conservative? They are just being disableist horrible trolls, there isn’t any political angle to it.
The ‘right wing= bad’ accepted wisdom is just ridiculous
Right-wing is just the latest term; the tactic itself is common. Anyone who dares question unfettered immigration is xenophobic. Failure to bow down to gender ideology is another phobia and, of course, there are the various isms related to other minority groups. The point is not to debate the accused; it’s to delegitimize them, to paint the person as beneath debate because their argument is based on something immoral.
As a right-winger, I am pleased to see the right given credit. In today’s world, you have the Left, which is always wrong, and the Right, which is always correct.
The Left has gone into a place where no sensible person should spend time – the Woke Zone.
Isn’t this the kind of thinking that has crippled the left?
The left has moved on to “hard right” in its demonization of those who disagree with their Marxist views.
Come on. You cite your sources. Simples. She was grotesquely immoral in the question of whether allowing anti-semitism at harvard was acceptable. If I have a course, where I give Mein Kampf as reading, we in the class read and analyse the book. But she was in a Senate hearing, and said its OK, depending on the context. The woman has absolutely no idea, zilch, what she is talking about. She is both immoral and deeply ignorant. No question.
No. It’s 100% a moral failure and a moral infraction. She chose to take the work of others and use it for her own personal gain. Simple. An intellectual failure would constitute being wrong or mistaken about something, not stealing someone else’s work.
“But then again, it seems that some on the Right don’t care about the latter either.” You provide only Ackman to support this claim. He’s not “on the right”.
Plagiarism is stealing, and stealing sits at #7 in the Ten Commandments. Probably considered a sin by some.
I am a highly cited scientist, and obviously consider rampant plagiarism as a sin, HOWEVER some aspects of self-plagiarism are essential. Years of research can result in a highly sculpted paragraph, which is the most efficient use of words possible, and therefore the most precise description of the reality that has been uncovered, eg X works by Y under the conditions, a, b, c. etc..). I have discovered issues which have been credited to me for 3-5 years (Spedding et al, 1976) discovered…. ‘phrase… ‘ but then pass into being obvious so the original inventor’s name is no longer cited (which is a sign of real accomplishment). I dont see why I cant reuse my little paragraph, (particularly if I discovered it), and especially as people now only read back 5 years. So some aspects of self-plagiarism I dont regard as being a crime (but obviously not publishing the same stuff twice, as being new)..
I agree, as a less-highly cited scientist. I have always believed that the Methods section should be regarded as “immune from plagiarism evaluation”. When you write the Methods, there are a limited number of ways to describe what you did. If the method is citable, fine. But if you “boil the water”, how many ways can this be said? And what about “The study was submitted and approved by the IRB of the University of East North Quiddich”? That phrase is going to be repeated, and cannot be changed.
With all due respect to Ms. Stock and whoever wrote this – Claudine Gay’s failure was intellectual not moral – the thesis here is tortured almost into parody. Gay presided over the expulsion of numerous students who were guilty of the same infraction that was conveniently overlooked, dare I say whitewashed, on her way to the school’s presidency. At the very least, that is blatant hypocrisy. By any accounting, it fails the moral litmus test.
The whatabouting regarding Ackman is straw manning on a good day. What Neri Oxman did hardly exonerates Claudine Gay. And Bill Ackman’s sudden realization that racial politics is a campus cancer that has infected the outside world is not exactly groundbreaking. It merely reflects someone who notices a problem only when it lands on his doorstep.
For anyone that had the interest and energy to read above analysis, its worth reading the thread by Ackman:
https://x.com/BillAckman/status/1745419163353395290
The reason is that press, including above article, makes a false equivalence on plagiarism attack on Dr Gay and Dr Oxman.
Dr Gay is paid nearly $1m to be the shining beacon of academic pinnacle at Harward. It turns out she got to the position with fraudulent merit. She also happens to be from a highly privileged background.
Dr Oxman left academia and MIT in 2020 and is a business leader and owner. She happens to be the wife of Ackman.
Attacking someone in a public position head-on with provable fraud is different from attacking someone family member who has nothing to do with the case. Even if Dr Oxman is a public person (seems relatively clear she is), it doesn’t mean that you can go after the family with false accusations.
So the difference is:
Gross fraud vs technical issuesHighly paid administrator in a public position vs family member of someone you want to get for political vendetta.
Its a false equivalence to broad brush these two, whatever your politics or views of the person.
Arguably Business Insider isn’t “going after” Neri Oxman, but using her as an example of how plagiarism allegations can be overblown.
Those going after Oxman do so solely as a “both-siderism” argument. Gay is an incompetent who has always gained from her skin color. She is an example of the DEIter principle, which allows black folks to have low bars for tenure, etc. She should be removed from academia entirely.
Oxman’s case is not comparable with Gay’s because Oxman hasn’t used her alleged academic excellence to seek the presidency of one of the world’s leading universities, nor has she been sitting in judgement on others accused of plagiarism.
Still, you have to pity the poor lefty journalist who had to cross-check all 300 pages of Oxman’s thesis to find three plagiarised paragraphs.
Actually, plagiarism is actually a sin – breaking either the 7th or 8th Commandment (depending on which flavor Christian you ask), Thou shalt not Steal.
The author of this piece does her best to try to deflect fault from the hapless (and meritless) Claudia Gay and push it back to the “right wing conspiracy, Vol XXVI” but it doesn’t wash.
Everybody, down to the Kindergarten Level, knows that cheating is stealing. And when you’re paying north of $50 Large per year in tuition for a school’s brand, it should be appropriately led.
The authors don’t write the headlines, which are super-clickbait here at UnHerd. Dr. Stock’s own contention is that plagiarism “really isn’t that grave a moral sin, as sins go”.
Needing context about genocide/killing Jews after October 7th IS a sin.
So is the term “intifada” or the slogan “from the river to the sea!” 100% inseparable from calls for genocide?
How would ‘from the river…..’ be achieved without genocide or something close to it?
A rhetorical framing that could surely be countered in a substantive way, as I suspect you know. I don’t support or defend the slogan, but free-speech and standards of fact often provide reasonable, warranted shades of context and intent. I also thought the Congressional testimony was dreadful and hypocritical, but this abandonment of all nuance and degree is not healthy.
The intent of the slogan seems obviously clear in its own words. What’s between the Jordan and the Mediterranean? The only way to have free Palestine in that territory is to eliminate what is currently there.
I wouldn’t have cared if Gay’s response was, “we do not any police speech in any way.” But she couldn’t say that because it would have been a blatant lie, so she went with the too clever by half reasoning that the lawyers crafted.
“Seems” indeed. I don’t fully disagree with what you’re saying but I know some who use the slogan have a different intent, whether through ignorance or over-subtlety or for honest reasons (which I might not agree with or understand) so there isn’t a one-to-one correspondence with genocide. The connection is much thinner with “intifada”.
Like most politics the big problem (here it was the whole DEI apparatus and targeting of ‘non-woke’ academic) tends to end up in trench warfare. So detractors use the little problems, like plagiarism, as the means to lever fingers from their grasp on power.
Johnson was out, not for mishandling Covid or the economy, but for an office party. Trump, having overcome impeachment, is being put through the wringer for property valuations for loans that were paid back and where no-one lost any money to try to de-legitimise his candidacy.
Consequently, we have to see the plagiarism claims both as the relatively trivial thing they are, but also as the final straw of a deeper power struggle over issues of consistency, hypocrisy, and attempts to hold power and control speech and viewpoint. The lesson, by now, for corporations should be to keep away from any form of politics or virtue signalling, to keep your head down and focus just on the job that you do.
Plagiarism is an example of a good old-fashioned Catholic mortal sin, the worst imaginable: laziness.
“Plagiarism is not a sin”, eh? Well, maybe not for those wiithout a moral compass, which obviously includes all feminists, including the authoress of this piece.
Feminism has always been the pursuit of female supremacy, “equality” merely being a staging post on the way. Constant repetitions of lies and myths are the trademarks of feminists.
I urge followers of Unherd to watch Professor Janice Fiamengo’s short video, “Why I Am Still An Anti-Feminist”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyRUHSsZZa4&list=PLGFFi6pRCnCdQTe1iG3Tw4Td9jvhY2w74&index=2
Her 39-video history of feminism, Fiamengo File 2.0, relates the truth about the history of feminism – the history you won’t hear from feminists:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGFFi6pRCnCdQTe1iG3Tw4Td9jvhY2w74
I invite Unherd followers to attend the next International Conference on Men’s Issues, to be held in Budapest next August http://icmi2024.icmi.info. Janice will be the keynote speaker again, her talk title:
“Calling a Moratorium on Women’s Tears: How Women Use Damselling to Manipulate Men, and Why Men Must Resist It.”
Have a good weekend!
Mike Buchanan
JUSTICE FOR MEN & BOYS http://j4mb.org.uk
CAMPAIGN FOR MERIT IN BUSINESS http://c4mb.uk
LAUGHING AT FEMINISTS http://laughingatfeminists.com
Adolf Hitler reacts to radical feminist Julie Bindel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZjcPaBrGqI
I’m a bit surprised at the degree to which UnHerd let’s you use these comment boards as a smokescreen for wanton self-promotion.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/young-men-should-be-furious-inside-worlds-largest-mens-rights-activism/
Plagiarism is not a sin, but stealing is, and so is bearing false witness.
Back on top form with this piece, puncturing the hypocrisy and flexible moral outrage of both left and right. Brava, Kathleen… I adore you!
“The infringement is intellectual not moral. ” WRONG ! Stealing is always immoral. There is a certain anthropological setting in which community use of an individual’s property is moral and acceptable, and this is generally in agrarian and tribal communities. Pioneers and primitive tribes are examples of these communities.
In modern society, which is based on laws and ideas, plagiarism is an infringement which is intellectual and immoral. To turn a blind eye to plagiarism of any kind is to lower ourselves to the level of beasts on the rise, …. animals who have been taught circus tricks.
Had Claudine Gay actually been an intellectual and a moral person at her core, she would have used her opportunities to find a place in society that she had truly and honestly earned. She would not have built a life on lies and intellectual theft.
Her sin is threefold or even fourfold: to abuse the gifts she was given, lie about them, bring her employer to a state of ruinous embarrassment by participating in the persecution of Jewish students whom she had a duty to protect.
Fortunately she can lose the glasses, grow her hair a little and stand up straight and then, maybe she can walk the streets without shame.
This is nonsense. Her real failure is excusing people who 1. want to finish Hitler’s program, 2. say the women they raped to death had it coming and so on. She’s another Andy Cuomo, who was removed as head of New York State for hitting on women but lauded for the worst decision in public health, forcing nursing homes with the most vulnerable population to take Covid patients, thus killing their existing patients. ANYONE with a brain knew it was insane; a guy I know in one of the homes said they had zero Covid due to stringent efforts until Cuomo’s solution. This woman is the academic version of Cuomo: she has aided the infection of academia with the Final Solution to the problem of what to do with the Jews. Her job as head of Harvard is to have courage and say the truth, but instead she’s not just one of Lenin’s useful idiots but a coward who Hitler would embrace.
That is sputteringly over the top dude. Wow.
Is it?
This “plagiarism trap” has been the career ender for a seemingly unlimited number of German politicians of late, where their theses are subject to rigorous evaluation. So, the question is, if you are a political leader, is it better to use the thoughts of others (usually wiser than yourself) or to develop original thoughts (which are often not of much value or even correct).
A university president, who is not a politician, should be subject to rigorous evaluation.
Not only is Gay a plagiarist, she is an amazingly unproductive academic. She got tenure at Stanford with 3 referreed publications, while others in the Poli Sci D had between 7-14 (I checked the CVs in the Poli Sci D). She was given the “black liisting” which today means that “you are black, so you need do only 50% of the work”.
If I were a black scholar, I would be completely livid over Gay and other fake scholars, who use the “black listing” to get ahead with 50% of the work.
I discuss the “DEIter Principle” on my blog:
https://georgeqtyrebyter.substack.com/p/the-deiter-principle
Great points Paul
Good discussion, good points, Ms. Stock. But I disagree with one of your points: you mention how stressful and even sleep deprived PhD student likely are–I’m sure you are correct. But I would say that PhD student’s are not the only one in life that has stressful work: : moms, medical doctors, working construction, anyone with a deadline, anyone with a crappy boss, anyone that goes to a 8-5 job.
Must of us laugh when we hear about how stressful academic life is.
A PhD student is being trained to be an academic. As such, the most important thing is to develop good habits. Get a reference manager – Zotero. If you quote, do so correctly – with quotation marks and a citation. This can be done IMMEDIATELY with Word and the Zotero install within Word. The habit must be ingrained and automatic.
Calls for ‘intifada’ are more comparable to people calling for a violent uprising against differing ethnicities than simply people objecting to the woke departure from colourblind liberalism.
Also, are the majority of people on the right really free speech absolutists, or do they accept that public calls for mass violence are probably unacceptable?
We are confused between nepotism versus DEI. They both serve the same purpose of keeping some groups have access.
Well i expected Ms Stock would say this – i would like to see her testify under oath that she has neither plagiarised nor appropriated other’s work. And i mean a real oath – Spanish or Sharia court, not the UK/US version “i had to shiv him i’m autisitc” or ” i had to rape her cos i identify as a woman”. Plagiarism is IMO a vicious crime that only works where the thief has an imbalance of power over her victim. There is no defence of hunger, mental health or addiction… the drive is pure greed. Put your hand up stock (or hold it out) see what i did there! I used to like reading this writer’s work ’til she turned into a hybrid of Polly Filler and Peter Hitchens lolz
Lots of protests in support of plagiarism – i used to sit 1st and rarely 2nd year Uni exams for cash even 2-3 years after i left and TBH i never had a very high opinion of my clients – touche brats.
The quality of her writing here on Unherd alone makes it clear to all but those who will not see that Ms. Stock has no need to plagiarize or appropriate others’ work.
Where is the outrage over Bill Ackman’s wife’s plagiarism?
Ackerman’s wife neglected to quote one paragraph, whereas there were 50 instances of Gay lifting text especially in her Ph.D. thesis, a systemic display pf plagiarism Big difference.
You didn’t see the stuff Neri Oxman cribbed from Wikipedia? There were two articles that showed different cases of plagiarism. Neri Oxman was just as bad as Claudine Gay. Neither one was bad enough to worry about.
Liberals always find a way to excuse black folks from actual accomplishments.
It says something about Harvard that Gay’s plagarism disqualified her from being President of the University but doesn’t stop her from remaining a tenured faculty member earning a reported nearly $900,000 a year.
Instead, I would have thought she could remain on as President, which does not require strong academic credentials, but should have lost her academic position.
Though the woke looking glass, normal logic no longer applies.
I differ. Plagiarism on the scale of Claudine Gay’s is most certainly immoral. If this isn’t immoral, I don’t know what professional behavior is? We’re not talking about introductory factual summaries here in molecular biology or algorithmic principles in software engineering. Her plagiarism was consistent w/ her narcissistic envy of actual Black scholars as well as entitlement to steal resources allocated for others far more deserving.
She repeatedly lifted entire paragraphs–not a snippet here or there–but paragraphs–describing what to me is completely uninteresting research anyway, but at least in its first iteration by someone else, was original. This isn’t just stealing, such as running a contemporary article through an AI program to generate another article, paste a faux name on it, and sell it. By claiming others’ work as her own, she falsified her qualifications–and not for wage labor to feed a starving family, or because she had the qualifications but was denied adequate employment due to lack of family connections, or her race, for example. She misrepresented herself to even qualify for the her first job as tenure-track, let alone full prof or dean or god forbid president of any state university– for which there were easily 500k more qualified people willing & able to assume that position–people not just more qualified but who’d faced a lot more struggle on the way there and desperately needed the money.
It’s identity theft in a field where identity–authorship–is all. She’s shown contempt for the very system in which she’s supposed to be a leader. The alternative would be that she doesn’t even comprehend the role that original scholarship plays in the entire enterprise, in which case, she’s still a pathological liar. Not only did she hurt so many others who were more qualified for the positions, compensation, & power she stole, but she hurt hundreds of thousands of those who would have been taught, led & shaped by persons who were truly qualified. Worse, she did this in part through manipulating good will aimed at redressing the very tremendous personal pain suffered by earlier Black Americans. It’s like she already received reparations for suffering she didn’t endure, but worse–she stole reparations for thousands more Black people, by squandering good will & displacing truly qualified persons.
Knowingly accepting a PhD, then cheating others out of a string of positions for which they’d gone into debt & given up so much sweat & personal equity, is grossly immoral. Her behavior ticks off the boxes of malignant narcissism, and most importantly & tellingly in her openly persecuting another Black scholar at Harvard who actually earned his accolades.
ENVY is the clue to interpreting her behavior, to comprehending that this wasn’t some benign, cross-cultural misunderstanding. Pathological ENVY. It’s at the heart of malignant narcissism. It’s both driver & symptom. Roland Fryer was evidence to her that a Black person, including someone who actually had faced severe struggle unlike in her pampered background, CAN make it on their own merits. (She rewarded other Black scholars, like Carol Swain, by simply stealing their work).
Gay’s fragile self-justification–her narcissistic identity structure–falls apart in the face of Black people who haven’t committed fraud to achieve scholarly recognition, particularly those old enough to have faced blatant racism as well. The respect Fryer gets is a respect she knew she’d never deserve & privately, behind her back, would never get–so she fell back on the narcissist’s trademark: character assassination. Her goal was to to remove him from their shared psychic world, from the shared international community of scholars that she’d fraudulently entered.
It’s textbook narcissistic envy and proof that plagiarism is her MO, not an accident of a busy budding scholar. It’s not just sneaky to cover up her flaws–she steals others’ work because she resents that they can accomplish the intellectual work that she’s too undisciplined & too arrogant to perform herself. Good writing, and thinking, entails a dose of temporary mindfulness. You have to look at yourself, your words, your thoughts, and get a little distance from them, to structure them convincingly for an audience on paper (or screen). That’s why great writing is usually painful even for “expert” writers. But she was too cowardly to even engage w/ her self-deluding stream of consciousness enough to write an original dissertation.
Profoundly immoral.
Very incisive and extensive analysis. The article was full of facile rationalizations and moral relativism. I’ve enjoyed reading some of Professor Stock’s other pieces but this one was a rank disappointment for me.
Interesting. However, if the author knows they are plagiarising, it really is in the moral category. Immoral or Amoral, it doesn’t matter. They have made a statement regarding their integrity.
Claudine Gay is the embodiment of wokeism, and why it is such a pernicious and destructive ideology. The very brilliant and once revered Dr King talked about content of character and not skin colour. Now, merit is added to skin colour and not content of character. The Western ideal has regressed in just 50 short years.
Yes I’ve seen it too. It’s too much trouble to discipline a student for plagiarism, especially if they belong to a minority of some kind.
I’ve seen this at first hand through the experience of a close friend, who caught a bolshie black student bang to rights lifting stuff wholesale (producing an essay way above her normal ability level – leading to further suspicions of use of illicit essay-writing services), yet faced no consequences, as even though the ‘Turnitin’ anti-plagiarism system and the essay tutor caught and reported it, nothing was done by university authorities.
This is precisely how fakery gets institutionalised for those guaranteed an easy ride through academia by virtue of their ‘victim’ identity.
So it seems like Gay is a trailblazer of sorts, one being widely emulated by those in a position to exploit the current system. To all our detriment.
Some element of revenge here, schadenfreude, unsurprising given Kathleen’s experience at Sussex. But if your children are paying future taxes into a system which blatantly needs reform – metricization of everything etc. – and can’t defend its own, we need to go further.
I know someone who worked for Shell in a quite serious technical role. He said many (10-15?) years ago that none of the men bothered applying for promotion now because they never got it. It always went to DIE hires even if they were vastly less suitable for the role.
This surrender by the men (mostly white) did of course make it much easier for Shell as they could more legitimately claim that the DIE hire was the most appropriate.
This has been going on to a greater or lesser degree for years!
Plagiarism is not a sin
Having searched the Code of Canon Law and found no explicit reference to plagiarism, I still suspect that the Church would frown on it.
She broke the tenth Commandment as she coveted the knowledge, ability and acclamation and IP afforded to others. As all Commandments carry equal weight, therefore the suggestion that her plagiarism didn’t violate a moral dimension is inaccurate.
“You also know that, unless very famous or very lucky, hardly anyone is going to read what you produce anyway.”
I gather from this that most of what elitist left-wing university academics produce is a waste of time and money.
I hope it isn’t subsidised by the taxes taken from the hard working common man.
Be assured that it is, Harvard’s $50 billion endowment nonwithstanding.
Stock misses lots of things in this article: she has not read the evidence about plagiarism well, or she would have noted that she appropriated whole footnotes from the texts she “duplicated”. She didn’t just steal texts, she also stole research work. That’s intellectual theft to my mind, and wholly despicable. Most importantly, though, I would say that Stock’s effort to show equipoise between Right and Left blinds her to the wider picture. She does not mention that the whole furore is not just about antisemitism (and plagiarism) but the much wider issue of what DEI burocracies have done to US academia. We owe to DEI an intellectual, epistemic and pedagogic disaster of epochal proportion. I have taught in the States for many years and I just cannot believe the deterioration of standards in the last ten years. And sorry, I’ve been a leftist all my life, but the Right is absolutely right in this respect. DEI has to be dismantled.
What academic area are you in?
History
I agree but you are too charitable. Appropriating research from someone else’s footnotes is more than just “theft”; it’s academic malpractice. If you haven’t engaged with the original source material, how do you know whether the author has characterised the source materials accurately? You may be taking credit for someone else’s work, or you may be copying their errors. The latter is a major risk in an age of “activist scholars” who distort research to score political points. As a result, trusting readers can develop very warped notions about sources they have never read.
You are right. I stand corrected.
I like the author, but I frankly did not like this article for many reasons. One of them is that the author is indifferent to the issue of intellectual honesty. For me, this is the starting point from which science begins.Therefore, for me the words “The infringement is intellectual not moral” are completely meaningless. No honesty – no science.
The second reason is that I didn’t see the far right fascists anywhere. It feels like these are the heroes of cheap Hollywood films, always white, athletic men with runic tattoos, who miraculously came from the screen into real life. I just don’t know where they are hiding, but they exist. Everyone says like that!
Droned on too long, getting more unfocused by the paragraph.
A very nuanced article by the always brilliant Ms. Stock. I’m sure she knows that had she been a professor at Harvard, Gay would have been leading the witchhunt to have her removed over her supposed “transphobia.”
It was not the fact that she was sacked as President that matters, it is an almost irrelevent position.
They kept this dud as a teacher, a position in which her cheating has shown she is not remotely qualified for.
Students paying dearly for inferior tuition, and their leaders have shown they just do not care.
Er … failing to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews ?
I think intellectual honesty is a matter of morality. It is not being wrong that matters. Everything we know is either incomplete or mistaken. (Working definition of a theory = best fit for now). It is for me an imperative to be as accurate and honest as possible in both scope and limitations. Especially when evidence leads to policy or when involved in training those that will.
I think plagiarism was the convenient crime. Harvard (and the left) couldn’t admit that their darling head had exposed their double standards on race – obsession about punishing micro aggressions about black people vs in favour of free speech when it comes to anit-semitism
The ridiculousness and impossibility of DEI hiring that truly reflects population demographics was brought into focus by the recent story on the lack of diversity at Channel 4, where the aim was to have representative percentages of minority ethnic, LGBT and disabled. So, by extension, you have to achieve equity across all categories so that the minority ethnic hirees also have the correct proportion of LGBT, and the LGBT quotient has the correct percentage of disabled. Then you have to perm and rotate all three, ie so that the LGBT component has the correct proportion of minority ethnic and disabled, and on and on. It’s simply impossible. Number one, these three demographics, particularly ethnicity, change over time, so to keep up to date you’d have to constantly hire and fire to keep the proportions “correct.” Number two, if you’re running a firm of steeplejacks or tree surgeons how do you accommodate disabled people? Number three, ethnic minorities are over-represented in soccer and under -represented in swimming. How do you “correct” that? Fact is the application of DEI is highly selective and therefore, in essence, discriminatory. Plus, in reality it’s mostly in nice white-collar middle-class jobs that the DEI delusion is adhered to most stringently. More discrimination.
Kathleen, in all this you sort of lost sight of how horrific Claudine Gay’s testimony was to Jews. For that reason I propose that the wearing of glasses should be a “protected characteristic” that’s incorporated in the DEI hire mix. Proportionately we Jews are more likely to wear glasses than the wider population. Admittedly, some of us do it just to look smart, but there are also genetic and cultural reasons, because we spend so much time reading small-print by candle light, though Liberal Jews use 15-watt bulbs, much to the approbation of the orthodox crowd, who consider this un-Godly. By so conspicuously wearing glasses Claudine Gay is guilty of cultural appropriation and piggy-backing on our centuries of suffering.
I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:
Plagiarize
Plagiarize!
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So don’t shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize
Only be sure always to call it please “research”
I read the above carefully, and with great interest.
When it comes to blatant plagiarism, I simply cannot agree. It will always be intellectually dishonest because the plagiarist takes others’ insights, inspirations, and text wholesale declaring it to be his/her own.
We’ve already seen in the past several years a plethora of previously esteemed research discredited for sloppy to non-existent scholarship. Plagiarism is just another example of corrupt academia taking for itself laurels reserved for others originality. The fact that this sort of cannibalism takes place within the scholars’ own ranks is especially ironic.
Nope.
I’ll never agree that plagiarism is anything other than the theft of intellectual property for one’s own benefit.
The operative word is “theft” in case you missed it.
First of all, total respect to Dr. Stock – I am a huge fan. But I think plagiarism is a huge transgression when your field of work is publishing academic research. I have a BA and MA, and I can say with absolute certainty, I have never plagiarized. I have also authored 2 books, one on autism – which contains original writing, as well as complete and accurate citations from research material, and a young adult novel of completely original writing.
As a HS English teacher, I work so hard to convince my students that plagiarism is lying and stealing, and is indeed a matter of character. It’s stealing someone else’s hard work and passing it off as your own. Certainly, a university president should be better than that.
As for the Congressional hearing, Dr. Gay was dead wrong there as well. She wasn’t asked if ” From the River to the Sea” was a call for genocide. That would have required perhaps a nuanced answer. She was asked if a straight-up call for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s Code of Conduct – not the US First Amendment – the school Code of Conduct, in which bullying, misgendering, and cheating are violations. Certainly, calling for the murder of anyone – which genocide most certainly is – would be a clear violation of the Code of Conduct. Such an easy question, and if asked about any other group – trans, Black, Arab students – she would have said it was a violation.
She deserved to be fired. As it is, she is still a professor with a president’s salary. Ridiculous.
Could Unherd’s headline writer be more careful? Stock does not assert that plagiarism is not a sin, but that “plagiarism of the kind Gay and Oxman apparently committed really isn’t that grave a moral sin, as sins go.” The careless version is a species of sloth, and the intentional version a species of theft (not of the words themselves, nor even of an idea — an absurd notion since the actual originator is not deprived of the phrasing or the concept — but of the credit or honor for originating the wording or idea). Maybe not that grave a sin, but a sin nonetheless.
I wonder if those glasses cause her neck problems?
Ms Gay’s sin was biting the hand that fed her. She did not get to the Presidency of Harvard on her own abilities; she got there as a trophy AA appointment the Money Folk could point to as an example of just one of their many virtuous good deeds. She turned on another one of their favorite projects, evidently higher in the Greater Good scale than DEI, and that was her undoing.
“Viewed like this, the punishment for plagiarism should be” exactly as spelled out in Harvard’s written Code of Conduct, under which then-Dean Claudine Gay suspended an average of 20 students / year for plagiarism.
No statistics on the racial composition of the expelled students although the efforts to excuse Gay, like this article, suggests there might have been racial bias.
Ms Stock uncharacteristically missed the point that Gay and her other two cohorts hauled before Congress had failed miserably at that “Free Speech” thing when it came to micro aggressions on campus. You’d better shut your mouth if you use the wrong pronouns or don’t support Antifa or BLM, amongst other minor transgressions. Paraphrasing the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld, “No Speech for you!”
Claudine Gay is already yesterday’s story.
UnHerd should arrange an interveiw segment with this guy Roland Fryer. Or at least squeeze an essay out of him.
A bit off topic: I am just finishing a graduate program within my major. I keep getting offers from my school offering me scholarships if I am a minority or indigenous. I am neither, however, I have the same financial worries. Like my colleagues being offered money for their skin color, I have zero sympathy for Ms. Gay, for she is a recipient of the best that American Education has to offer its students and she chose to take the easy way and cheat.
Plagiarism is stealing. Stealing is a sin, even among the sisterhood.
I’m going to be controversial here and state that the performances displayed at the hearing, and the actions that predated them, did not evince anti-Semitism but simply cowardice. Unprincipled attitudes is today’s hard currency and they’ve been using them copiously. How else did they get to the top of the tree? The poor things did what they thought was required of them. They probably noticed that ‘progressive’ nowadays stand with Hamas and so they couldn’t burnish their credentials.
Stock raises many good points that are worthy of consideration, but I’m disappointed by her framing of them as Left- or Right-oriented. It’s puzzling that she seems to downplay the moral standards evidenced by not only Gay’s plagiarism but her equivocating view of pro-Hamas (and definitely antisemitic) demonstrations and Harvard’s code of conduct. Surely positions on the political spectrum are secondary to moral standards, which are more closely associated with religious and philosophical grounding.
In my experience, if you find a student plagiarising, you will then have to spend a huge amount of time going through an investigation and this will be done in your own time and depending on your contract, you might not even be paid to do it so for the most part, you’re just going to ignore that plagiarism, unless it is wholly copied directly from Wikipedia, Word for Word , and even then if you can avoid it, you will
Theft is not a sin…nor even a question of morals?
Surely this would come as a surprise to Moses and his two tablets of stone, engraved as they were by the finger of God.
To covet, to steal what is another’s property and claim it as your own…to enjoy the benefits accrued those stolen goods….to bask in the acclaim that rightfully is another’s? How could this not be sinful, let alone illegal, immoral, unethical, and cross-the-line a terminable offense, especially in academia…especially at Harvard, whose motto is TRUTH.
The normally insightful & consistently on-target Ms. Stock dances right over all that and tells us instead that Plagiarism “isn’t that grave a moral sin, as sins go. It’s easily done and on an individual level can be detached from any deeper character flaws.” What??
What Claudine did was unacceptable, completely & absolutely.
The fact that plagiarism is “easily done” is completely irrelevant. Murder, too, is actually pretty easy: point a gun, pull a trigger, Boom! Does that somehow begin to excuse it or make it magically less serious?
And how on earth can a sinful act be somehow detached from the character (the soul) of the individual who quite consciously chose to commit that act? ‘Well, yeah, I pulled the trigger…and I was quite irritated with the victim….but I’m basically a really good person who obviously would not deliberately INTEND to commit murder (especially now that I’m caught with the smoking gun).
The arguments are ludicrous.
But the response recommended is quite appropriate: “the punishment for plagiarism should be unfashionably medieval.”
Indeed it should.
Yes it is; it’s theft